GARDENER'S WORD - IDEAS AND TIPS

When you go to a store and buy raspberries, they are often quite pale in colour and lacking in taste.  The reason is, I believe, that they are picked (and sold) before they are truly ripe because ripe raspberries do not travel well.  They become soft when ripe, tender, and easily spoiled when piled on top of one another.  That is why raspberries tend to be more expensive in the shop than, say, strawberries because there is an amount of spoiling involved in the packing process.  Something like that.  When my raspberries are in season, in my garden, I like to leave them until the fruit becomes quite dark and then I pick them and eat them the same day or the next day. The flavour of my raspberries then become intense and delicious.  You can tell a raspberry when it is ripe not only by the colour but also because you don't need to pull them firmly to pick them; they should almost drop into your hand with a very gentle pull.  Be careful though, leave t...

I like strawberries but only when they have a good flavour.  I cannot grow them well in my garden, and when I buy them from the supermarkets they rarely taste as good as they look.  Sometimes they hardly taste of anything at all.  I cannot say the same for the lovely little Alpine strawberries that I grow in pots in my garden.  They are easy to grow, and very hardy.  The red fruit is tiny, and round, and when allowed to ripen to a deep red colour, well, the taste just blows me away.  Wow.  It's a slightly perfumed and intensely strawberry flavour.  They are super to eat on their own, like sweets (but better for us) and great on breakfast cereals.  I've been growing just one plant but this year I have planted about five.  I'm getting greedy now.  Alpine strawberries  (Just mind the slugs don't get them first).  I grow mine in pots raised up from the ground but I bet they grow well in hanging baskets and will look delight...

Autumn is upon us with chillier nights and mornings.  I've emptied and taken into the garden room the Smart solar-powered pitcher cascade which is not frost proof.  There are lots of things that need doing to wind up the garden for winter but I am taking it slowly, step at a time.  Today I picked more alpine strawberries.  They really are beautiful little berries.  When ripe they have such an intense, almost perfumed flavour, that I really love.  Getting to them before slugs is the challenge so I have placed my plant, which I grow in a largish pot, onto a plant trolley to keep them higher off the ground - dangling in mid air, the berries have more of a chance.  The birds seem to ignore them.  Good.  The berries are best picked when fully red and eaten straight away - lovely with breakfast cereal.   The alpine strawberry plant is fully hardy and here on the Pennine Mountains of West Yorkshire, I get flowers and fruit from late spr...

It might have been a miserable November so far, on the Pennine Mountains in the north of the UK at least, but despite the constant rain and fog and sunless skies, I'm picking alpine strawberries and a few Polka raspberries.  I had some today with my breakfast cereal.  The alpine strawberries taste so sweet and they make me smile; they look to be such delicate plants with dainty white flowers and very small berries but, like some people, they're a lot tougher than they look.  Alpine strawberries and Polka raspberries - November 2015 Alpine strawberries - November 2015 The raspberries are taking a beating though as despite all the flowers and the tiny green raspberries, this horrible weather is making some rot before they can reach edible stage.  Still, I'm happy for whatever I can get.  The everfruiting, ever-yielding, perpetual strawberries, or whatever they are called, continue to flower and form fruit but the fruit isn't ripening bec...

Autumn's on the doorstep and here, on the Pennine Mountains of West Yorkshire, it feels very much like winter is nearly here some days.  The weather is mercurial.  This morning we had sunshine, so I did the washing, hung it out, and dark clouds came over.  So I brought the washing in, dried it indoors, and the sun came out.  I went outside to read, on the swing, and the sun went in.  Anyway, you get the picture.  The way I feel must be how the garden plants are feeling as nothing has been as it should be this year weatherwise.  I'm picking the tiny alpine strawberries as they ripen, about one every three days!  They are worth growing, you know.  They have an almost sweet perfume to them.  So different to ordinary strawberries and great for putting with breakfast cereals, if you have enough.   It's taken what seems like forever for the Wisley Magic runner beans to get going—but got going they have.  I don't think I'...

This summer in the UK, certainly here on the Pennine Mountains in the North, has been disappointing (putting it politely).  Things have taken so long to grow, flower, fruit, and for some gardeners nothing much has happened at all.  I'm not here to talk about the failures in my garden this year but of the successes.  I love to go out and pick at things that I grow and, after a quick rinse with cold water, eat them straight off.  No putting in a meal, no waiting, no messing, just gone!  Imagine, all those vitamins.   I've been doing this with the cut and come again lettuce, with the pea shoots, with the Italian parsley (ever eaten parsley raw?  It's wonderful and full of iron).  I've been picking at the Alpine strawberries, and making herb teas from the applemint, the lemon thyme, the lemon verbena, the lemon balm (I like lemon).  All are grown in pots on the top patio of my small garden.  Even people with only a balcony can do t...

Although it's not been a great year for garden crops (except for the cherries, and the Polka raspberries which were magnificent and are in flower yet again for, hopefully, an autumn crop) there things that are doing ok.  The Wisley Magic runner beans were a bit late in taking off after an extended spell of cold weather in spring but now they are producing lots of beautiful scarlet flowers and plenty of long, straight, stringless, beans, just like last year.  I've picked some for dinner tonight, and some tomatoes which I've already eaten.  Sweet Pea, Wisley Magic runner beans. Tumbling Tom and Losetto tomatoes (both types look the same) Picked some Sweet Peas too to try to make the house smell fragrant.  A kind (sarcasm here) neighbour had a mighty, billowing bonfire this morning that reached to the sky.  Apart from covering all my newly hung out washing with soot, and all my garden furniture with soot, and soot over everything else too, the sm...

Even though not so long ago I thought my crop of Prunus avium 'Stella' cherries was going to be a disaster, they've got a move on in the last couple of weeks.  Initially they seemed to have ground to a halt at the green stage, no bigger than a regular-size pea.  The weather can do that, put the brakes on fruit development, and we've had some horrible weather this spring, but my luck was in.  Today I've picked a small handful of ripe cherries and there are more to come.  Doesn't sound like much but when I consider that the dwarf tree (planted in a large container, sunk into the garden border) has only been growing in my garden just over two years and that last year, when the crop was damaged by weather to the extent that only about six cherries remained, I feel like I've had a bumper crop in comparison.  Prunus avium 'Stella' Gisela 5 (dwarf sweet cherry) ripe for the picking I wrote in my last post about the cherry tree that I wouldn't go ...

For a number of years I have grown various types of strawberries with varying degrees of success.  I gave up on the well known types which are commonly seen in the supermarkets because they were often either deformed, diseased, or didn't develop at all.  I turned my attention to the more successful Perpetual strawberry variety, (also called everfruiting or everbearers) which is all I grow now.  I grow them in a pot and in a free-standing trough and although the fruit is rarely large, they don't seem to suffer from that awful grey mould known as botrytis.  To discourage disease, every couple of years I discard the old plants and replace with new ones grown from the runners which the parent plants create.  I noticed, last year, that there was a strawberry growing amid the perennials at the top of my sunny border and I decided to leave it right there to see what happens.  This is what happened: Strawberries from plant found growing in my per...

It's pounded with rain again today, amid spells of sunshine.  I came home to hanging baskets almost breaking their chains under the weight of water which had cascaded off the house roof.  I grabbed a skewer and punctured more holes into the plastic which lines the baskets allowing more drainage - not punctured right at the bottom but about an inch or so above so that during dry weather there is a place where a reservoir of water can settle.  This weather, sun and rain, has been great, so far, for the raspberries and strawberries.  The Polka raspberry, despite the challenges of rust disease and white drupelet disorder , is providing lots of healthy fruit.  I picked a big cereal bowlful yesterday and another one today with plenty more yet to come.  Everfruiting strawberries Polka raspberries Unfortunately, the big fat so and so of a Wood Pigeon is attacking the raspberries.   Much as I love birds, this bird is so destructive that...

What a gloriously sunny day we are having today on the Pennine Mountains of West Yorkshire.  While it was a cold start, things heated up by early this afternoon and I was able to sit on my hammock/swing and read for a while.  There isn't much by the way of colour in my garden right now although the primroses and crocuses are doing a great job of cheering up the garden.  I've grown the crocuses in a square container which I covered over with mesh during winter to keep the squirrels at bay.  Squirrels like eating crocus corms very much and will dig them up.  Crocuses growing in a tub Crocus stamens Crocus stamens - macro I forgot to mention that the Irises are out too and giving dashes of blue in a small border as well as in two pots at the front of the house.  They are really lovely. Unfortunately, sunshine, birds, an ever-present prowling Ragdoll cat, and jobs that need doing, are always a distraction when I want to be lazy.  So I d...

I know I am English and rumour has it that we are supposed to talk about the weather all the time, well it's true and I offer no apologies.  While we aren't suffering the deadly volumes of snow that the people of Buffalo, New York, are suffering, we've had days of miserable grey skies, fog, and rain.  My garden is covered with soggy, rotting, leaves and the slugs are having a field day.  I swear they are like Gremlins in the movie of the same name, and multiply at a crazy speed when wet.  Today, rain has held off and we've even had a little bit of blue in the sky and weak sunshine.  I took advantage.  I've taken down the hanging baskets filled with Swingtime and Southgate fuchsias which have been fantastic for months on end.  As soon as we get serious frost, it could quite easily kill them.  To be honest, I'm not exactly sure how tender or robust these two types of trailing species are.  Sadly, they were still flowering and it seemed li...

I cannot believe that I am still getting handfuls of Polka raspberries and juicy perpetual strawberries so late in the season.  Will it last?  I doubt it, there's an almighty wind blowing outside, shaking the fences and the trees.  I don't know how the seed feeders are still on their hooks.  It keeps sunshining, intermittently, with lashings of rain inbetween.  I am so glad that I trained my raspberry canes cordon-style —more horizontally than vertically—in order to try and keep some fruit on them when the wind does this.  There are literally hundreds of tiny green raspberries still in the process of maturing.  The strawberries, in the freestanding trough and containers, are dripping with half-ripened fruit.  I keep picking them a little too early to try and get to them before the slugs and the weather.  As for the Polka raspberries, I have never, not once in all the few years that I have grown them, seen an insect on them other than pollinat...

As part of my personal little campaign to get other gardeners to grow plants which attract pollinators, I must mention that strawberry flowers do just that.  It's so easy to forget the small flowers that are not particularly showy but I've noticed that lots of the little flowers in my garden are just as attractive to hoverflies and bees as are the bigger ones like the 'Pooh' dahlia .  Growing open flowers with their stamens exposed is the way forward although plenty of other, more complex flowers attract them too.  The fuchsia , for example, has stamens that jut out below the flower, as do the honeysuckle , runner bean  flowers.  Anyway, these are a couple of photos I took of hoverflies on my perpetual flowering strawberries. Hoverfly on strawberry flower - macro photograph Hoverfly on strawberry flower

Gardening will never cease to amaze me.  While the Polka raspberries that I grow are really autumn fruiters, they are also double-croppers.  That means that the summer fruit grow on last year's old canes which are cut down when they finish providing fruit, and the autumn crop grows on the current year's new green canes.   I understood that if you allow double-cropping, then the summer harvest will be at the expense of the size of fruit in autumn.  For a few years now I have grow Polka and while the summer crop is reasonable, the autumn crop has been quite disappointing.  That is probably down to the awful cold and wind we keep getting leading up to winter.  This year though I have noticed that Polka is providing giant raspberries on this year's canes.  They taste great too. Polka raspberries, autumn crop of this year's canes I noticed that the developing raspberries were very large.   If the bad weather could just hold off until t...

As it so often is, today it is blowing a gale but dry so far and a wonderful day for washing and drying bedding.  I took advantage of the sunshine for my washing and for myself.  While mooching around, camera around neck, I spotted a ripe strawberry hiding from me among leaves.  How dare it?  I thought it should be punished and so I bit it very hard. Death of a strawberry by biting (macro) Some website and books describe the strawberries that I grow as perpetual or everbearers while I have seen them described as everlasting.  This year I have been very pleased with the crop I am getting from my perpetual strawberries this year.  Last year the strawberries were mostly deformed, covered with botrytis mould and abysmal.  I don't know why this year has been good because, yes we've had a good amount of sunshine, but we've also had long periods of rain and I expected what strawberries were forming to rot and be deformed again.  I've no...

I managed to take two or three macro photos which I particularly liked this morning while the sun still shone.  It's been raining on and off all day but the rain just adds to the interest sometimes.  I noticed that the jasmine officinale has just about finished flowering now although there are a few buds still waiting to burst.  The strong winds lately knocked a lot of the flowers off and left the climbing shrub with lots of empty calyxes.  A cluster of flowers of the Sempervivum pumilum drew my attention, I don't know why.  It looked half dead and I considered dead heading it then scrutinised it down the camera macro lens, and this is what I saw... Sempervivum pumilum - Macro photograph Jasmine calyxes after the flowers have gone I also took what I think is a nice photo of a tiny flower on the Heuchera 'Marmalade'.  You'd think these flowers, which are only about 3mm across, would be insignificant but they make quite a statement clustered on a ...